How and Why Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Uses Twitter to Reach Patients

Mike Morrison tweets for Massachusetts General Hospital as @MassGeneralNews and for Massachusetts General Hospital for Children as @MGHfC. I met Mike when I tweeted about the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine including @MassGeneralNews in my tweet and Mike immediately followed me. I contacted him to find out what his strategy is for Twitter use and what the benefits have been:

Lisa: Let’s start with the name: Locally we say MGH or Mass General and even the website uses all variations of the hospital name. How did you decide what to use for Twitter to be recognizable and searchable to locals and everyone else?

Mike: The name was a tough decision. MGH was definitely an option but outside of Massachusetts it doesn’t resonate. Beyond that it was a matter of pragmatism. Twitter limited the number of characters for our name and we definitely wanted “News” in the title so after that is was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Lisa: Do you know anything about which MGH employees – or patients – are on Twitter?

Mike: We usually find out about patients, doctors, and staff on Twitter by seeing their tweets. Each time we’re followed by an account I like to take a good look at the profile to see if they are in one of those categories because I want to continue building that sense of community. We also occasionally remind our own staff about our presence through our internal weekly newsletter.

Lisa: Tell me about your background: what did you do before this and how did you learn to use social media?

Mike: After graduating from the University of Maine in 2005, I completed a post-college PR/Marketing internship at North Shore Medical Center in Salem, MA, close to my hometown. After 3 months I was hired at the Museum of Science (MOS) in Boston as a Publicist in the Media Relations department. I worked at the MOS for more than 3.5 years and loved every minute. Though I had originally joined Facebook in college, it was at MOS that I began to see its full potential as a professional communications tool. Along with my colleagues, I worked to launch both a Facebook “fan” page, as they called it before the most recent “like” change, as well a personal page for Cliff, the Museum’s triceratops fossil. I also helped to launch both the YouTube channel and the @MuseumOfScience Twitter page. The jump to social media communication, though conceptual at first, became a reality for us when the media industry began to severely cut staff. Many of those cuts came from Arts and Entertainment writers and reporters who helped us garner much of our publicity. It became quite clear to us that utilizing social media was an important practice.

Lisa: Explain more about why it was important and also how social media for a museum compares to a hospital?

Mike: Social media is important because it allowed us to connect with passionate Museum fans and communicate our news that, while perhaps not ‘big” enough for traditional press to cover, was important to them. We were also able to have a lot of fun. We ran contests for our Facebook fans and Twitter followers. The staff at MOS continue to come up with even better ideas for engaging fans. In terms of a comparison, both hospitals and museums need to listen and interact. At the hospital we have to ensure that we apply our high standards of patient privacy to our social media practice. Though I didn’t realize it before I arrived, MGH’s world-class research programs ensure that science is very much part of what we do. Some of the most covered MGH stories come from our ground breaking research.

Lisa: How long have you been at MGH, what are your roles, and how did you get this position?

Mike: I arrived in October of 2009. I received an email from a friend letting me know they had noticed the MGH position and thought I should take a look. At its most basic level, my job entails the traditional proactive and reactive media relations (pitching stories/pairing our experts with media). I also oversee social media for the Public Affairs department and do general writing assignments like web stories or annual report stories. Two examples are http://www.massgeneral.org/about/newsarticle.aspx?id=2462 and http://www.massgeneral.org/about/newsarticle.aspx?id=2377.

Lisa: What do you do specifically in this role?

Mike: While at MOS, I would say 80% of my job was proactive and 20% reactive, whereas as now that number is reversed. We respond to hundreds of media calls each year and also operate a live television studio to accommodate national and international broadcast requests. We in Public Affairs work on a beat system with staffers covering different areas of the hospital. Mine include Global Health, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Imaging, and Orthopedics. The other part of what I do – and a major reason why I was hired – was to help launch and integrate social media communications. Luckily my superiors saw the importance of social media before I got here and when the opportunity came to fill a position they made social media a priority. So to that end, I launched @MassGeneralNews on Twitter last February and hope to hit 1,000 followers by the end of this year. I also launched our YouTube channel (www.YouTube.com/massgeneralhospital).

Lisa: Does MGH have a Facebook presence as well?

Mike: Yes, our colleagues in the development office do a great job: http://www.facebook.com/#!/massgeneral , we have a really nice collaboration. Recently, some colleagues and I did launch a profile page in order to communicate bicentennial (we turn 200 in 2011) and history info from the hospital. The profile belongs to Padihershef, a literal mummy who resides in the Ether Dome: http://www.facebook.com/#!/MGHPadi

Lisa: How much time do you spend on the average day?

Mike: Assuming my day isn’t a crazy media day with a major event, I generally work 8:30-5:00 with 60-70% of that time being spent on media calls and the vast majority of the remaining time spent on social media (practice, monitoring, and self-education).

Lisa: What happens with Twitter when you are off duty – do you ever check nights or weekends? Mike: When it comes to Twitter I’m never off duty. While it’s not required for me to check on weekends, I absolutely do. While that probably comes more from a personal desire to grow the presence and not an expressed mandate, I also know the conversation never stops and I like to keep up on it. Occasionally I “unplug.”

Lisa: What oversight is there?

Mike: I’m fortunate to work with superiors and colleagues who “get it.” Though our social media presence is monitored by the leaders of our department, we have a decent amount of leeway.

Lisa: Do you get physicians and other staff at MGH involved, for instance feeding information to you to tweet?

Mike: Often we are approached by different groups in the hospital about the use of social media to promote their efforts. We do in fact work with doctors and administrators from various departments to add their content to our platforms whenever possible and ask that they send us current interesting content.  For example we were approached by an extremely talented group of researchers from our Emergency Department who created a great free app for the iPhone, which lets users find the closest emergency room to their location anywhere in the United States. Our strategy here was to create this YouTube video and then pitch to bloggers encouraging them to use our embed code for their stories. We got great a great response on this as it was posted to Boston.com and Wired.com’s Geek Dad Blog. Although it’s tough to get publicity among a sea of apps, our video allowed us to provide more content for bloggers and increased our chances of getting attention. Even if we didn’t have the pitching success we did, we were able to tweet the video and the link to download, as well as post to our Facebook page. It was a great combination of traditional pitching, content creation, and social media.

Lisa: Does MGH have a social media policy?

Mike: MGH does have a social media policy which helps to provide clarity for our employees and audiences for social media interaction with MGH, or on behalf of MGH.

Lisa: What is the ROI – is MGH doing this because everyone else is or because they see this as essential to their mission, and how do you know you’ve been successful:

Mike: For us, it was easier to think of social media as an important tool we can use to accomplish the goals we already have. We are more of a news/PR office and not marketing so I’m more concerned with communicating and sharing stories or useful information and less about bottom line. Although that’s probably a little shortsighted of me, it’s easier to get started when you already have the goals and the content, and think of social media as a vehicle for both. While I think ROI is important, I’m a true believer that if your reputation is solid you’re going to get the business anyway. To MGH, social media is essential to our mission. Our mission (although I’m not quoting) is to help people. If we know people are looking for help through social media channels, we should be there. For me, it’s like us not having a website or telephone: how can we help if we’re not using the same technology as our patients?

Lisa: How much monitoring do you do of MGH’s online presence and how (obviously you saw my tweet!)?

Mike: I monitor Twitter constantly. I have searches set up via tweetdeck for our Twitter handle, hospital name, and several of its variations. While I don’t log any of the info in any kind of official report, I do respond to and inform folks we work with about any tweets or communications that could indicate a wide-spread issue that warrants a response. Also, if time allows, I do some simple Google searches (blogs, news, etc.) just to see what’s out there.

Lisa: What are specific strategies you use to follow, get followed, tweet, and get retweeted?

Mike: First off, the tweet is king. I try to always offer interesting content, or at least content that is a bit more humanizing and takes away the mystique of a huge faceless organization. Beyond that I try to slowly follow people who are tweeting about us or healthcare in general. I find using hash tags to file my tweets by medical topic often results in followers because people searching that tag are usually the most passionate. Also doing simple things like adding social media icons to my email (as long as outlook is behaving) and putting information about our Twitter handle in the weekly employee newsletter helps. Most importantly, I build followers by engaging. For me it would be easy to view Twitter as a one-way source, but MGH needs to be retweeting and asking questions to develop a truly valuable follower base.  Also, our breaking scientific research news is probably our most retweeted.

Lisa: Do you compare what you are doing to other hospitals or any other organizations?

Mike: I definitely like to see what other hospitals are doing with social media. Any great organization keeps up on industry trends and I think lots of hospitals across Boston and the country are being really creative. It’s also a great benefit to attend conferences with folks at other hospitals because we trade ideas and tips. I think that’s what I like most about social media: the community spirit.

Lisa: For someone starting out in a similar role or wanting to improve a hospital’s online presence, what are your 5 pieces of advice?

Mike:

1. Content. If you don’t have good content, you have nothing. Obviously this isn’t my idea but I believe it’s the gold standard of online communications. Not offering good content would be like opening a YouTube page to host your TV commercials…snooze……
2. Commit. Never use social media “cause everyone else is doing it.” Once you have an idea of your content, make sure you commit the time or allow your employees to commit to learning and practicing it. Even if it only takes a minute to tweet something, you need to be looking at Twitter constantly. At any other job, searching YouTube channels may be grounds for a conversation with your manager, for me it’s a matter of researching best practices and keeping up on trends.
3. Culture. In order to become involved in social media, you have to understand the culture. If you ever friended your parents on Facebook, you get my point. When starting out, just listen. This is especially true with Twitter. For example, someone who doesn’t understand the Twitter culture might find it odd for MGH to retweet a “competing” hospital who just won an award for a service we offer. But the Twitter audience is completely comfortable with this. At the end of the day it’s about standing on your own work, your own reputation.
4. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. For us, it’s patients. When I think about good content, I try to think about a person who has just learned that they or a family member has been diagnosed with an illness. What they want is to get the critical information quickly. What they don’t want are slick commercials, pop up ads, or a link to a phone number with no information.
5. Be human. How many times do we hear about robo customer service? Or how some large organization seems like a monolith that doesn’t listen? Social media puts the power back in the consumer’s hands and it’s important to engage in two-way conversation. When people feel connected to your organization they’ll work with you. Even if they have a negative experience, they’ll return as long as they’ve been heard.